Chapter Text
Miguel watches her for days before he makes the decision to take her.
Once he’s found her, it becomes readily apparent why it took him so long to track her down. The woman he’s been watching and following across dimensions (so easy to track down in those worlds; hardly the effort of this one) lives almost entirely off the grid in his universe, through no fault of her own. Until he’s able to pull some strings to make submitting employee records a state-wide law for all public and privately owned companies, she has almost no reason to ever come into contact with any record system.
She’s not on any kind of healthcare plan—mostly pays out of pocket for doctors operating small local practices, and hardly ever visits one anyway from the receipts he finds tucked neatly away in a folder tucked under her bed in her room—and doesn’t have a driver’s license. That’s not atypical for someone living in the city, but for someone living in one of the neighboring cities, where public transit isn’t as quick or flexible, it sticks out.
It means she’s living hand to mouth. Means she’s skating through life virtually unseen. Means she could fall through the cracks at any moment, and if he hadn’t been looking—if Miguel hadn’t been purposefully seeking her out, he might have gone the rest of his life without ever crossing paths with her, and that—
He sees red for the first time.
When she pings on his screen, it’s game over. It’s life moving on to a new chapter; a branch splintering off and tumbling down with it. The coming of red dawn, the maw of a new world opening up to him; for the first time, he sees something made for him and wants to take.
For a week, he follows her on her route throughout the city across the river, gritting his teeth so hard that they nearly crack when he sees the sweat bead and trickle down her face and neck from lugging bags heavier than her from the sidewalk to the truck. Her body is lithely muscled from the physical work her job demands, but it’s easy to see where her company cuts corners—the maintenance team is running on a skeleton crew, only two to a truck and forced to cover a large expanse of the city that has her working far longer than a standard eight hour shift.
She has a smile that startles like a scar, worn down by years of use. It makes his gums itch a bit, makes his teeth want to settle into something.
He watches her work so hard that some nights she collapses onto her beaten down couch the moment she makes it home. She works herself to the bone, feeds herself the bare minimum to keep her body going, and then chugs cheap energy drinks on her way to work the next morning to keep her body moving.
It wouldn’t matter in any other case. Miguel can’t allow himself to care about every atrocity; there are already so many stacked on his shoulders, and if he cares, he has to do something about it, and he can’t keep chipping away at himself.
It’s his wife though. His wife that he’s followed across universes. His bones creak in his body when he watches her from the other side of her window. Nearly goes short of breath. When she hardly remembers to lock the door for how quickly the exhaustion sinks in, he nearly pulverizes the pole line that he hangs from in the lane outside of her place.
The poor thing sleeps right through him breaking in through the kitchen window, doesn’t so much twitch on the couch as he snaps the latch and quietly lowers himself in. When he pads from room to room, he’s purposefully light on his feet to let her sleep, but it still infuriates him that she doesn’t so much as twitch when he stands in the doorway facing her couch.
Her slumbering body remains prone on the couch as he hovers over her, close enough to run the palm of his hand over her back, feeling the heat rising off her. She’s quiet when she sleeps, hardly moves apart from the way her back rises and falls with her breaths; he wonders if she might be more restless if she wasn’t always on the brink of collapse, exhaustion sunk deep into her bones, making her limp and lifeless in sleep.
It’s different from watching other versions of her. His skin feels more settled in his own world—that thin layer of electricity crackling up his skin isn’t present in his own universe, so when he watches her, his mind goes completely quiet. The faint worry nudging at the back of Miguel’s mind at seeing her obviously so drained from work is pushed aside in favor of the quiet luxury of kneeling by her slumbering form.
He doesn’t realize he’s tracing the bow of her lips with his thumb until they part at his touch. He stares as if outside of himself. Miguel’s seen this so many times at a distance removed. He’s seen hands like his own trace her face and comb through her hair; to feel it himself, to push aside the strands of hair from in front of her face and tuck them behind her ear, is nearly surreal.
She breaths just a bit heavier in sleep, a gentle sound barely audible over the whirring of her air conditioner.
He stays there, kneeling at the side of her couch until dawn breaks across the horizon. When the first bird sings and her eyes flutter open, Miguel’s already gone, feet quick across the rooftops on his way back.
Something inevitable is just around the bend. Miguel can feel it in his bones; something that he didn’t know he needed until it came alive in the dead of night.
He’s careful to cover his tracks. It comes with years of practice—his years as head of the genetics program have taught him how to keep a secret. Nevertheless, Miguel’s surrounded by people trained to sniff out a secret. It’s like he’s hand-selected the agents of his own demise.
The first person to confront him on his frequent absences around headquarters is, unsurprisingly, his current least favorite Spider-Man.
“Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen that handsome face,” Peter B. gushes, clasping him on the shoulders when he strolls in unannounced into Miguel’s office. It’s more of a vast auditorium, deep within the labyrinthine colossus of Alchemax, functioning as both Miguel’s office where he pours over reports from across the Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse and partially his old workshop, prototypes from earlier generations of the dimensional travel watches and larger portals strewn about.
“What.” He’s always at a net negative in patience with Peter.
“All right, easy does it, pal.” Peter’s hands go up in front of him when he swings around to stand in front of Miguel, obscuring his view of the screens displaying recordings of the other dimensions. Mayday babbles from where she sits in the baby carrier strapped across Peter’s chest. “I come in peace. I miss you—feels like we never hang out anymore.”
“We did before?”
“Come on, Miguel, pal, friend—”
“Bueno, manos a la obra.”
Mayday giggles from her perch in between the two of them; Miguel reaches out to swipe his thumb across her cheek where stray Cheerio crumbs are still stuck to the soft skin there. He wonders sometimes if Peter doesn’t bring his daughter along just for the sake of keeping his temper in check. It wouldn’t be the worst idea Peter ever had.
Peter sidesteps him when Miguel tries to cross to the other side of the platform to put some distance between them. “Just thought I’d catch up with my favorite bossman. See what’s going on.”
“Have I not been giving you enough assignments?” Miguel wonders out loud, arching an eyebrow. “I thought I’d give you a break since you, you know, you’ve clearly given up on the whole saving the universe thing.” He waves a hand to where Peter’s standing dressed in his pink bathrobe, hair still unkempt like it hasn’t seen a brush in weeks. There are oatmeal stains across the shoulder of his robe like Mayday had a bit of fit over breakfast. “But I can change that, if you’re bored.”
“Okay, quit busting my chops. Just wanted you to know that I’ve been thinking about you. Miss seeing you around base when you’re always off exploring other worlds like some kind of buff Marco Polo.”
“Next time you want to waste my time with another round of inane questions, just tell MJ to email me.”
“Right-o, boss!”
Jess is far more inconspicuous about it when she confronts him.
Miguel can feel it coming well before it does. They pass through the red hexagonal pods in the redistribution dock, followed by the eyes of the various anomalies they’ve collected over the last several months. Most are slated to return to their own dimensions in the intervening weeks—they have to account for timeline issues and their fuel consumption because nothing comes without a cost, but Spider-Byte sits on the other side of the deck hunched over her control panels, calculating all of that for them.
“I want to say something without it coming off as insubordination.”
“You’d be the first.”
“I think you need to recuse yourself from the next few missions. Take a break from visiting the other dimensions.” Her gaze is sharp and knowing when it falls on him, kaleidoscopic when she stares at him through one of the jewel red pods. “Particularly the ones you’ve been frequenting.”
Miguel can’t say it’s surprising that she keeps tabs on him. It’s part of what makes Jess such a good second. Little happens in Alchemax that she isn’t at least somewhat aware of; sometimes, when he looks into her eyes, he can see that knowledge shimmering behind her yellow mandorla-shaped glasses. Like staring at a fossil encased in amber; there are things she could tell him that would stagger him to his core.
“You have concerns?” His voice is light when he questions her, but it’s warranted. He just wants to prod and see how far down her concern goes.
“I’m not going to ask what you’re going to those other dimensions for, but…you need to exercise more caution. We don’t know what the repercussions are—what inhabiting other dimensions for extended periods of time might do.”
Miguel stares at her. Right through her. The refracted image of Jess’ eyes blink back at him; all eight of them holding a thinly veiled concern.
The smile that spreads across his face is enigmatic, titillated even. There are things he won’t share, even with his second, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist within him.
“No te preocupes. My feet are firmly planted on this side now.”
She’s quiet, for a moment assessing him like she would an enemy. If she finds anything amiss, it doesn’t register on her face; some things she hides from him as well. Instead, Jess gives a firm nod, ending the conversation on that note, and stalks off down the long hall of holding pods.
His smile holds despite the distance she puts between them.
It’s true, what he said. There’s no other world he would rather be in these days.
He passes through his wife’s apartment in the daytime hours like a phantom coming out of the wall. The time when they’ll meet face to face is rapidly approaching—Miguel can feel it coming in his bones, like a dull, old ache—but in the remaining hours or days or weeks, he moves through her place like a haunting.
For once, she sleeps in her bed instead of the couch. The sheets are strewn about her like she never made the bed before leaving in the early morning hours. Miguel stands in the doorway and stares, the faint rumblings of something cataclysmic starting up in the depths of him. She’s clad in only her thin night shorts and a threadbare tank top that’s sloped over the curve of her breast, a beaded nipple on display. His mouth waters when he stares at her.
These days, he hardly sleeps. Half-nocturnal. There’s a hunger in him that’s growing and it’s dangerous.
With his wife slumbering away, he feels safe to traipse around her room, pulling out books from her shelves and cracking open old notebooks where he can half-discern her writing. Even in the dark, only illuminated by the faint shine of moonlight pouring in through her window, his eyes are able to make out the swirls and slopes of her writing, the product of his new genetics.
Miguel lets the cover of her notebook fall shut and walks over to the other side of her room to where she keeps her hamper tucked away inside her closet. He hardly has to rummage around in it to find the underwear she changed out of earlier.
He knows he shouldn’t, but when he fingers the gusset of her panties and finds the center of them still slightly damp, probably swapped after she came home from work, his mind lets go for a split second. Miguel comes back to with her panties pressed up against his nose, breathing in the heady scent of ripe peaches. His breath goes shaky and uneven, fist clenching around the fabric which strains under his fingers. His claws pierce right through.
It’s not right. It’s not right and it’s probably too soon, but Miguel can’t stop his feet from taking him to the side of her bed, towering over where his little wife sleeps curled up on her side.
The bed hardly creaks when he lowers himself onto it, curling himself around her until there’s only a hair's breadth of space between them.
It’s not enough these days just to look. There’s a fine tremor that runs through his hand until he rests it flat against the curve of her hip and suddenly it washes over him. The feeling that, yes, this is too soon, that this will demand a forgiveness that he will never earn, but that this is his right.
He has seen the two of them across a million lives, always coming together or falling apart or finding each other again. His fingers tighten over her hip. In every world, it’s them—fated. Destined.
It’s approaching a quickening.
Miguel stills when she turns over in her sleep, lifting his palm to allow her to roll over onto her side, facing him now. Eyes still crinkled in sleep, but mumbling something softly, pink tongue coming out briefly to wet her lips. His blood pumps furiously in his veins when she stretches a hand out, as if reaching for him.
“Do you feel it too, gatita?” he murmurs to the sleeping girl facing him. His breathing goes haggard when she hikes a leg over his hip; can only imagine what’s happening in her dream for her to seek him out like this. “I’m here; I’ve got you. Do you feel it happening?”
He means fate collapsing over them. He means the penultimate note of the overture.
Her response is to wrinkle her nose at his voice, sleep dripping off her. She surfaces from her dreams gradually, eyes fluttering and opening sightlessly before consciousness comes back to her. Before it clicks and her eyes register a shape in the dark next to her and her hand flexes where she grips his shirt and her leg tightens around his waist instinctively.
“W-wha—” Miguel’s throat closes at the sound of her voice, soft and breathy as it is, still rough from sleep.
He moves over her quickly, rolling her onto her back and hovering over her, fangs already nestled against the delicate skin of her shoulder before she has a chance to start thrashing. When he hears her lips part, a scream about to bellow out of her, he sinks his fangs in enough to make her grunt, the pain cutting her off. The slide of his teeth into the muscle of her shoulder is almost enough to make him lightheaded; he has to be careful when he’s accustomed to being rough.
He palms a hand over her mouth in case she tries to scream again. When Miguel draws his head back, he finds her staring up at him fearfully, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. It makes him cluck his tongue, makes him go soft right in the middle of him.
“Shh, gatita, todo saldrá bien,” he shushes her, speaking quietly into her ear. No sense in upsetting her more. “Vámonos a dormir, ¿vale?”
Her lips are wet underneath his palm, tongue peaking out just slightly. It hits him hard, the sudden wave of arousal that threatens to cloud his head, but Miguel staves off the urge to buck his hips into hers from where he lies over her. There will be time for that later.
The venom travels slowly through her veins, so he holds her there with his hand over her mouth whispering softly to her until she sags into the bed.
His hunger surfaces and then abates. There will be a time for everything. That time is coming shortly.
The world opens back up to you like a ripe persimmon. Sticky and soft. Your eyes are still fuzzy when they crack open and your mouth is still gummy when you take a shuddering breath in. You smack your lips and wet them.
Your head pounds like you just woke up out of a rough thirteen hour sleep. Maybe you did. Your whole body aches when you try to roll over, but the sheets covering you are softer than anything you’ve touched before, so instead of fighting it, you sink back into the bed. You’re lying on a bed. You close your eyes again and let the fog of sleep descend back over you; your head’s still too packed with cotton to consider waking up.
Waking up.
You remember waking up.
Eyes closed, you scrunch up your face, the fog lifting again. You remember waking up; you remember sitting on the concrete step by the water and gazing out across the river, tracing the lush greenness of Nueva York with your eyes in the early morning hours. You remember waiting in line at work, the creepy-crawliness of anxiety that only dissipated when you finally clocked in, pulling on a fluorescent vest and hauling yourself onto the back of the truck.
That can’t have been that long ago.
The next time your eyelids peel open, the world around you is fuzzy and dark. It doesn’t change when you rub your eyes, not until what feels like several minutes pass and gradually your eyes acclimatize to the dark.
The first thing that occurs to you is that you’re not home. You’re in a dark room splayed out on a bed of cream-lavender sheets. It’s at least three times the size of your bed, and while it’s infinitely more comfortable than the rock hard lump you usually sleep on, the hair on the back of your neck instantly raises because you don’t remember falling asleep here.
White strings encircle the bed on all sides and when you manage to pull yourself up and crawl over to the edge, your jaw drops when you see that the bed is embedded in an onyx platform raised several stories above the floor below. The room itself—a vast industrial space poorly lit by soft white flood lights—seems to be merely the container for the platform hovering in the middle of it.
On a closer inspection, the white strings turn out to be a thin gossamer webbing, almost translucent. You raise a hand to touch it.
“I wouldn’t touch that,” a deep voice suddenly says from somewhere nearby and your head spins in the direction of the voice. “You won’t be able to pull your hand off.”
The first thing you notice is the size of him as he drops down from the wall where he’s been flanking you, watching for who knows how long. The breadth of his shoulders that taper down to a narrow waist and strong thighs. He’s nearly twice the size of you standing on the outer edges of the platform, still behind the webbing. The coloring of his outfit is immediately recognizable, even to someone like you, who lives across the river. The red spider emblem in the middle of his chest practically screams out who he is.
“W-why is it there then?” you ask, voice thin and warbly because you’re nervous and just woke up.
Even behind the mask, you get the sense that he’s amused. “Precious cargo. Can’t be too cautious.”
You frown despite yourself.
Despite his words, Spider-Man (you don’t know his actual name and you don’t ask) has no qualms with touching the delicate webs to push them out of the way, the webs pulling taut when he fits himself through them. Your heart goes right up into your throat.
He sinks into a crouch on the bed with you, sitting back on his haunches. His thighs spread wider in this stance, but you fix your eyes on the mask covering his face, not looking down at where the muscles bulge. It would be easy to let your eyes sink down, but something about the way he looks at you, even through the opacity of his mask, has you sitting upright and still.
“Is it even—are you going to tell me where we are?” Your mouth feels funny making the shape of those words.
“At some point, yes. I don’t want to overwhelm you on your first day here.”
The man’s face is covered by a blue mask so dark that it borders on black, only the red eye embellishments giving it color. When it peels back, rippling like an illusion but not quite, there’s a man underneath it with a face that you recognize.
“I’ve seen you before,” you blurt out, eyes widening. His face is somber, tanned cheeks clean shaven and angular, hair a tussle of waves. Your fingers twitch in the sheets like you’re thinking of running them through his hair. “You woke me—you were in my bed.” You remember it like found footage, static memories of his face hovering over yours in the dark, mouth stained with something and a pain in your shoulder that throbbed and ached.
Zero emotion plays across his face at your words. He’s as handsome as he is unflappable.
“Yes,” he agrees, dipping his head into a half-nod. “I’ve been watching you for some time.”
If he registers how that sounds, he doesn’t let it on. Your skin crawls with something akin to fright, but it boils into nothingness when he rolls his shoulders back to get more comfortable. It’s hard not to take notice of his physicality, hard not to let your eyes sweep over the muscles packed across his shoulders and chest.
“Did I—did I do something?”
“Did you do something?” he repeats, cocking an eyebrow. He has thick, masculine eyebrows. Again, not the time nor place.
“You said—you said you’ve been…watching me? Why else would you if I hadn’t…done something?” You look around you as you speak, hesitant to take your eyes off the unnamed man facing you but trying to see if there’s any obvious way down.
Your face goes hot when he gives a quick smile. It diverts your attention back to him for a second, catches you off guard. “You haven’t done anything wrong. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Okay…”
He stares at you still. You realize you’re cold, shivering there only half-dressed in a strange bed in a strange room with a man looming near you, who won’t look away from you. You lapse into silence because you have no frame of reference for this; you’ve never been kidnapped out of your bed and taken to a strange, floating room and made to lie in a bed like a slumbering princess.
“Am I—” you start and then stop, clearing your throat. “Do you—why am I here then?”
“For now? Just to relax.” His eyes trace over you. You gather the sheets to your chest, cheeks flushing at his perusal. His eyes flick back up to meet yours. “You’ve been working yourself to the bone. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”
There’s little you can say to that. It’s not untrue. Exhaustion clings to you barnacle-tight, like another body wrapped around yours. The pain in your shoulder is nothing compared to the soreness in your bones. Some days you feel like some gnarled thing with teeth.
“I want to go home,” you say instead.
He doesn’t respond, but you can see it already. It sits in the subtle shift in his eyes. You are already home.
“Can you at least tell me who you are?” It’s desperate this time. You’re probably saying all the wrong things. People don’t talk like this when they’re kidnapped, you think, but you’re so tired. It’s an effort to even keep upright.
He smiles again. “Miguel O’Hara. I’m this universe’s Spider-Man.”
The name rings a bell, but a distant one. He phrases it in a peculiar way. This universe. As opposed to any other. Your eyes dart around again, mapping out the room. You know already that there’s no way out; nothing except solid steel walls and the soft padding of the bed underneath you.
“Are you—are you going to let me out?” you ask, voice going hoarse.
“Of course, chiquita,” he croons, eyes going half-lidded. It’s almost seductive, the way he looks at you. “Later. When you’re rested.”
There’s an instinct in you that whispers, play along with it. It’s a million years old and it’s telling you something significant.
You flinch back when Miguel leans closer to you for a moment, big hand coming up to cup your cheek. His fingers aren’t as rough as you might’ve expected. Your cheeks go hot under his touch, so hot that your eyes water and your nose prickles. His lips twitch, amused.
“Get some sleep. I’ll be back to check on you later.”
It comes to you in increments after he departs that for how pretty they look, the gossamer spiderwebs that shimmer in the light, the webs surrounding the platform make it seem an awful lot like a cage.
Twilight comes like clouds dripping from the sky, the color of crude oil and something ill.
Miguel turns at the sound of her footsteps across the metal floor, body preternaturally still where he leans against the metal railing that wraps the Alchemax rooftop. She moves a bit slower these days, still light and limber on her feet, but more deliberate.
“You could’ve had me come downstairs,” he says, flashing the watch on his wrist in her direction.
“Thought you might want to talk about this away from…prying ears,” she replies mildly, cocking an eyebrow. It’s clear what she means. She spells it out anyway. “Peter’s lurking in your office. Thinks he’s being sneaky waiting for you to come back.”
The sudden pulse of a headache makes him shut his eyes and run a hand across his face. “He’s bored. It makes him restless.”
“You could let him visit Miles?”
That suggestion only makes Miguel’s headache grow more intense, eye twitching when he opens them. “No. That’s not on the table. I’ve already made it clear that no one’s to visit Miles Morales’ dimension.”
Her face goes slack with pity at his words, which is expected but still dangerous.
“You’ll do it then?” he asks, taking a step towards her.
She’s still for a while, scrutinizing him again. Miguel knows what she’ll find there. It’s baked into his skin, this need pressing down around him. He’s scraped rough without it, love opening him up like a raw wound.
When she nods, it crystalizes.
“Tell me what you need me to do.”
It’s coming together now. It’s so close that he can taste it; something like rust and ruin.